


Myself, Master

by britishparty



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Clone theories, Yoglabs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 04:44:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4087411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/britishparty/pseuds/britishparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memories are unsteady things, and Lalna’s no longer sure who his memories belong to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Myself, Master

Lalna-not-Lalna-spare-clone-him-not-me.   
The emotions fought and battled and struggled within him, trying to break free and take over, but he wouldn’t let them because they were his feelings but they weren’t him.  
He hadn’t been told it would be this  _painful._  He’d thought the cloning would be tidy, neat; that he’d just clone himself and get it over with, then spend the rest of his days on science and technology and escaping this prison made of dark stone.  
 _Wrong, not-him._  He shoved the thought, the shredded memory of a black prison, away before it could take hold. He’d never get any work done like this, with different memories and feelings and emotions clawing their way in through his eyes and his hands and his mind, just like her, just like Moth-  
Not-him-not-me. He dispelled the thought forcefully, focusing on the open book in front of him. It was scribblings of magic, tatters of spells that he’d managed to pull through the veil free of emotions. He hadn’t dared remember what the magics were called; that memory was too firmly anchored among the others’ emotions to be of any use.  
“You’re nearly gone, aren’t you?” Came the voice behind him.  
Familiar, he thought faintly, and then he was swamped by images: a slate-stone beach, a spaceship, a floating island, a land full of puzzles. Closer but still wrong, still not-him, he decided, and cut the flood off.  
He turned to see the speaker, and was nearly crushed by the weight of thought and memory and feel-taste-see-smell-hear that came with the face. Finely trimmed beard, sparkling blue eyes, pristeen attire and a concerned pout - all things he knew.  
Right. Him. He knew this man. Carefully he delved into his mind, prodding his memories, hoping for something useful.  
A name. The man’s name.  
“Xephos,” he managed to say.  
With that memory came more, but they were easier now, belonging to someone very like him.  
“I’m impressed,” Xephos said, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “That’s more than you’ve managed in nearly a month.”  
A… month? Some part of this was right, but it felt wrong, like that time was too short or too long.  
Too short, he decided. He had seen too much, lived too long for it to be only a month.  
“Where am I?” He said. It was difficult to keep track - the red building, the blue and white tower, the metal pillars, the island in the sky.  
“Safe,” Xephos said after a moment’s pause. “Safe but unstable.”  
It was then that he noticed the glass walls all around him, the dust gathering on the pages of the book on the table, the little sign on the other side of the glass that he couldn’t read.  
“I’m unstable?” That couldn’t be right. He was stable - or maybe that was the him-not-him?  
“There’s a reason the master clones get frozen,” Xephos told him with a little sigh. “But of course you used yourself as an experiment.”  
Experiment? That word brought up flashes of a black castle and a man with purple eyes. Was that him? It was becoming difficult to tell.  
“Can you make it stop?”  
The blue eyed man regarded him with caution. “Yes,” he said, “if you’re willing to forget it all.”  
“No,” he argued feebly, “I don’t want to forget, I want to stop remembering.”  
“If you still won’t forget, then I suppose there’s nothing I can do.” Xephos got to his feet. “Keep writing, okay?”  
Yes, of course, the writing was him. He focused clouded eyes on the dusty paper and the pen held loosely in his hand. Magics, wasn’t it?  
With that word alone came so many feelings, war and hate and regret and love and Mother all wrapped into one bundle that made his hands shake and his heart pound.  
“I’m not sure how much longer I can pass you off as Lalnable,” Xephos was saying sadly. “Honeydew is halfway to figuring it out, and I’d hate to have to kill the clone currently in use. Get better soon, Lalna.”  
Get better? He wasn’t sick.   
With vivid clarity an image sliced through the haze; stepping out of the DNA sequencer, turning to watch as another him was constructed from the marrow of his bones to the clothes on his back.  
This was his memory. He was the master clone.  
He remembered seeing the clone open its eyes, and then he’d collapsed from the distortion of seeing through two eyes. He remembered watching himself collapse, running to his side and trying to wake him.  
He wasn’t sick, but one of the others, the him-not-him, was. The one that had a disease growing on his skin, discoloring flesh and messing with his mind, letting  _her_  in-  
 _Not-him._  Savagely he sliced the memory off. Memories from that other were difficult to look at; he seemed to be the strongest, the brightest, the happiest of all of them.  
The girl, who was the girl? Love, hate, fear, laughter - worry, too, so much worry that sometimes it overwhelmed him and made him sick.  
Fear-love-fear-worry- _fear_ , fear of what he couldn’t say, fear of himself, of the girl, of loving and losing and forgetting.  
Who-watches-the-watchmen and blue robes and a purple-stained lab coat; a flickering silo, a nuke, a castle of black stones, a pile of rubble-  
 _Fear_ , fear of the purple-eyed man and purple and the girl and Mother and a small orange cat-  
With a roar of agony he slammed his hands down on the table and shoved as hard as he could. He went flying away, tumbling onto his back like a girl falling into a fountain and an astronaut crashing in the middle of the ocean and a man suddenly appearing in a prison cell.  
Yells, footsteps, people, blue eyes, a beach made of slate, an empty cloning vat.  
“Forgetting,” he whispered, clutching at cloth and long legs and a neatly trimmed beard, “let me forget. Make it go away!”  
He was begging now, begging for his life as he’d once made others do; begging to be saved, to be saved from the purple and the magic and the mage who dwelt in shadow and the girl with rainbows and sunshine in her smile.  
“I thought you’d never ask for it.”   
Familiar voice, familiar face, blue-

Blue eyes and a neatly trimmed beard.  
A face almost-but-not-quite familiar, and a voice still not used to this language.  
Xephos.  
The name, so clearly alien in origin, rolled off his tongue pleasantly, like that of an old friend’s.  
White walls and a steel blade. A sword, easy in his hand and an extension of himself.  
A wrench, a wall of machines, a task. Easy for his sharp mind and trained thoughts.  
A mission, a girl, another man who looked like himself.  
Easy for someone as obedient as him.  
Lalnable.  
His name, not quite right, but close enough to pass.  
Puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit; a puzzle with the important pieces all taken out.  
Ah, well. A project he’d get to later.  
Right now, he only had to do as he was told.


End file.
